The bother of choosing between an 18-month contract or a high up-front price may soon be the least of your worries when buying a new mobile phone, because you may soon be required to prove your identity before you're allowed a new handset.
The government is said to be drawing up plans to force all UK mobile phone buyers to …

Funnily enough

I was having a conversation just last night in which we wondered how long this would take to come along. Funny you wait ages for a stupid, repressive piece of legislation to come along, and then several hundred arrive at once!

Another nice piece of logic to help the "should we have ID cards" so-called 'debate' along.

I doubt this will stop Jihadi 'A', owner of an East Ham mobile phone shop, selling Jihadi 'B' a phone/sim not in his name. Only now, they may have yet another use for stolen ID documents, so that Mrs Ethel Jones, the 87 year old retired dinner lady, gets her brains spread over the living room wall by Pigs with Guns.

I like it

I quite like it, it has been daft that anyone was able to buy a phone and sim without registration. An ensuring that existing phones need to be registered is actually not that difficult to switch on. And also let's not forget people whilst everyone is talking about foreigners, they are already subjected to provide biometric information prior to being granted a permission to enter or stay, registering their phone details is a very easy next step to do.

But most of all, we are running way behind other countries in this approach, way behind and it is about time we act.

@Roy Stilling

We must tackle the terror ththreat

All you people seem to have forgotten 9/11 and 7/7. Do you want your daughters blown up by extreamists who want to take away our freedoms? Is it not better to place our freedoms in the hands of our government, which when all is said and done have our best interests at heart? After all this is only going to affect those who are doing something wrong. I know that in some ways we all fall under some new law or other that says we are terrorists. But thats never likely to lead to someone being shot accidentally.

Instructions

@ Lee RE: RE: Useless

I entirely agree with all your counter points, with the possible exception of "3" (would YOU bother to report the loss of an uninsured PAYG phone worth only a few quid?) but you seem to have missed mine. I don't anticipate the average man/woman in the street being arsed to do go to such measures.

But the article states:

<<SNIP>> According to the Government, the purpose of the Bill is to "allow communications data capabilities for the prevention and detection of crime and protection of national security to keep up with changing technology".<<SNIP>>

I draw your attention to "prevention and detection of crime and protection of national security". I read from that that the supposed purpose of this initiative is to ensnare criminals and terrorists, but it's going to do no such thing, as the determined among them would likely be able circumvent it in a number of ways.

The net result would be a nice big database of (reasonably) law abiding citizens. In fact, given the requirements (ID card or passport) and popularity of mobile phones, it's tantamount to a national ID system by the back door.

Black Helicopter, as I've digressed from my original point into (un)healthy paranoia.

Re: And foreign phones?

That’s easy. Foreign SIM cards will be given a few days grace, after which they’ll have to be registered, just like UK ones. The foreigner will be expected to take their SIM card and passport to a mobile phone shop, to get the SIM card registered. As they won’t be a customer of the shop, there’ll of course be a fee. Say, £30? Because that’s likely to annoy the executives of large foreign companies, large foreign companies will be able to pre-register the SIM cards of their employees and directors, with a special pre-registration fee of £100 per SIM. As this could be a nice little earner, networks are likely to advise non-pre-registered foreigners to visit one of their own shops through text messages counting down how long it is before their IMSI is blocked in the UK. That’ll show the rest of the world just what sort of country Britain is becoming.

Are we still allowed to think independently?

This stinking criminally negligent government seems to want to get inside everything that it shouldn't be whilst forgetting what its prime responsibilities actually are.

Roll on the next general election when we can hopefully boot this bunch of thugs out and hopefully install a Government that will let the average person go about his or her daily business without being constantly scrutinised at virtually every level of there existence just so there details can either be lost or sold on to whomever the database owner is holidaying with.

I know its a long shot, but we're all allowed to dream, aren't we?

If this country doesn't return a less invasive Government, will the last bugger out switch the lights off?